


bidding it have no fear

by andibeth82



Series: a dialogue of self and soul [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Flashbacks, Kid Fic, Natasha Feels, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Avengers (2012), Protective Clint, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 09:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Red Room, they don’t teach you about life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bidding it have no fear

**Author's Note:**

> One day, [a friend](http://hjea.tumblr.com) asked for a Natasha/Clint baby fic. Eventually, the author realized she was in over her head with 12,000+ words, an inclusion of all earth's mightiest heroes, and the birth of a series.
> 
> Takes place directly after the events of Avengers, though all resulting storylines are a product of my own headcanon. Since this story was started well before the events of Winter Soldier, it is, clearly, non-compliant with all MCU movies that comes after it. For story purposes, it also uses the comics canon of Natasha's Red Room background and age.
> 
> This series in its (eventual) entirety - would not exist without the help of my own Avengers team: [bobsessive](http://bobsessive.tumblr.com) and [fidesangelus](http://fidesangelus.tumblr.com). Thank you for your tireless beta of multiple 14 page drafts, your suggestions on everything from titles to storylines, your willingness to let me spend hours on the phone with you while ranting about spy babies with (lacks of) movieverse backstories and for helping me beat my characterizations into reality.
> 
> All work titles in this series taken from the poems of William Butler Yeats.

Two weeks and five days after the battle of New York, after schawarma and Loki and goodbyes and “I swear to god, Stark, if you and Banner blow up the other end of Manhattan, I’ll kill you myself,” Natasha finds herself in a hotel room overlooking what’s left of the city’s skyline, a bottle of tequila and a singular black leather leg stretched out on top of the bed. Clint is in the corner, fiddling with the tops of his arrows, and the whole thing is a cross between strangely familiar and strangely awkward.

“By the way.” He finally raises his head and catches her eye across the room. “When you said that this was just like Budapest all over again, you _were_ referring to the battle, right?”

Natasha drinks and looks up, lips quirking into a half smile around the rim of the glass, and then -

“Don’t be a dick, Barton. I know where you sleep.”

 

***

 

There were many words Natasha had grown accustomed to in her lifetime that started with the letter _s_. Spy, because she had always been a spy, couldn’t remember when she _hadn’t_ been a spy. Stealth, because that’s how she was still alive, that’s how she hadn’t gotten killed, even though she probably should have gotten killed and yet somehow, here she was, dripping red and all. Sharp, because everything about her had to be sharp, her senses and her knives and her aim.

 _Settled_ was never in her vocabulary, not even a little bit. But then S.H.I.E.L.D. is offering them safe houses until they figure out what they want to do (which, in the words of Maria Hill, Natasha takes to mean “until we have another mission for you”) and Clint is making coffee in the morning and no one is knocking down their door trying to kill them or compromise them (yet) and the whole thing is a kind of normal she’s never really had, so Natasha decides it might not be all that bad to, well, to settle.

Besides, she can still kill people if she needs to; it’s not like she doesn’t sleep with a gun at her bedside and reflexes made of steel. And at the end of the day, she’ll admit it helps to have someone there when she remembers officers throwing her into a chair, their catatonic monotones permeating her senses -

“What’s your name, love?”

_Natasha Romanov. Natalia Romanova. Black Widow. Natalie Rushman._

“I don’t have one.”

\- and later, Clint’s hand on her arm, eyes locking and voice soft.

“What’s your name?”

“Natasha. My name is Natasha.”

 

***

 

Vodka nights (which they shared for the first time after Clint didn’t kill her, didn’t follow orders, held her hand and asked her name instead of putting an arrow through her throat) used to be about how many people they’ve killed and how many targets they wanted to destroy.

Somewhere along the line, it became about the people they saved.

And then somewhere along the line, it became personal.

“You lost your virginity before you turned 10.”

“Fiction. I was 11.” She throws a smug look in his direction; he’s stretched on the couch and she’s lying with her head in his lap, pointed fingers skimming across brown hardwood. She lets the silence hang in the air before continuing.

“You kissed that girl in the bar in London because you thought she was me and then lied about it after.”

He flinches, and she takes pride in the fact that after this, after _all of this_ , something as trivial as _that_ can make him uncomfortable.

“Fact,” he says in a morose tone, a frown lacing his features. “What the hell, Nat?”

Natasha shrugs, nonplussed. “I read your file,” she replies in a voice that she knows she can only use with him, a voice that gives ten different meanings to four words, a voice that’s so much more than _I read your file_. She sits up and Clint narrows his eyes, scooting across the floor until he’s right in front of her face, features obscured by hair that’s messy and wild and unkempt, curling around her chin in an almost savage way, in an almost indestructible picture of calm and chaos.

“You love me.”

And that’s where Natasha hesitates, freezing with the bottle halfway to her mouth. She lowers it slowly, her face sliding into something he can’t read, blank and expressionless except for a thin sheen across her eyes and a quiver in her tone that threatens to obscure the firmness of her words.

“Fact.”

Sometime later, when she doesn’t remember having finished off the bottle or climbing on top of him, they’re on the floor with bodies pressed to the ground and she’s digging fingers into the skin of his back and his tongue is trailing her body and she’s feeling more alive than she’s felt in a long time, more alive than when she escaped from the Red Room and when they finally won the war and maybe being settled wasn’t the worst thing in the world after all.

 

***

 

The morning after, she makes the coffee, brings the mug to bed and places herself on the mattress with the same care she once used when she sat herself next to him on the Helicarrier after rescue from a hell deeper than he knew.

_Do you know what it feels like to be unmade?_

_You know that I do_.

They spoke of it, a little, in the days following the attack while the city cleaned up and the reports were filed. She went to bed seeing the pain in his eyes and he woke up seeing the regret in hers, but Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov were nothing if not trained for emotional resolve, even when it came down to things like brainwashing and murder and secret keeping, even after years of trusting and saving and then re-learning how to trust and re-learning how to save. So they dance around the subject, drink until they can’t drink anymore, pretend that things are okay, that they weren’t unmade, that aliens didn’t invade New York, that they didn’t watch their friends almost die, that she didn’t get scared and that he didn’t kill innocent people.

“Why didn’t you tell me I was going to feel like shit?” He pulls a hand over his eyes as she yanks opens the shades.

“Don’t drink with a Russian. Everyone else seems to have learned that and they’re not even sleeping with me.” She watches his fingers find purchase as they curl around the porcelain.

“Tony’s not a Russian,” Clint grumps, sliding back against the headboard, and Natasha grins.

“Stark gets a pass.”

“What the hell for? Because he built me some new arrows?”

Natasha’s smile drops, one hand lingering on his thigh. “You know what for,” she says quietly, her eyes drifting to the window and the still-ruined skyline, and there’s enough unspoken language loaded within her words to silence the conversation entirely.

 

***

 

When Natasha was fifteen, she made her first kill.

It wasn’t intentional – she wasn’t trained, not yet, but she was alone and the man was armed and pulling the trigger seemed like an almost natural response. So she didn’t bother to ask his name, didn’t try to talk, simply pointed her gun at the spot between his eyes and refused to look away. Afterwards, she threw up in a nearby trashcan and then hailed a cab, sequestered herself in a dingy hotel room under a too-American sounding name, and proceeded to clean out a bottle of vodka.

It became easier after that, as it always does, and mantra became credo, as it always does: Survive. Shoot. Kill. There’s no time to think of anything else, there’s no time to consider anything else, there is _only_ surviving, _only_ shooting, _only_ killing.

In a life shaped by death, there was only death, and that was only what Natasha Romanov knew until the day that death didn’t come.

 

***

 

Sometimes she blames Clint for making her live, for not letting her die, for showing her that life could be worthwhile if you weren’t creating chaos. Sometimes she blames Clint for the fact she feels anything at all, for learning what it means to simply _care_ , because when you’re being pumped with a chemical that’s supposed to make you stronger, faster, better, when you don’t age and you’re immune to the most human of things like getting drunk, when you heal faster than the average person, when you can’t have kids because your ovaries would probably explode and anyway, scientifically, it was _just not possible_ , you don’t think about things like how it would feel to have a child, a child who wouldn’t be a soldier or a super human or have their memories taken away, who could love freely and without watching their back, who wasn’t made of arrows and denial and knives, who wouldn’t be unmade like their mother or father, a child who would just _be_.

 _You can’t promise that_.

Heat rips through her body and she gives in to the feral reaction, throwing a wide punch to the wall and sinking knuckles into concrete and plaster. Instant pain laces through her clenched fist as she withdraws her arm, stares blankly, makes a mental note to tell whoever was in charge of accommodations that safe houses, for the good of everyone involved, should come with gyms or punching bags or hell, at least one of those goddamn stupid stress balls.

It only takes a few more for the wall to cave completely, splintering wood and chips of paint sticking out of a messy but otherwise pristine canvas. She presses her palm against it without thinking, stares at the smear of blood on white, a print of two fingers dripping red, red, red, right onto the hardwood floor, always dripping red, even when she tries not to drip red…

Natasha senses the movement of the hand before she feels it and turns with a grunt, one arm flinging back against her attacker. In the midst of striking out, she becomes faintly aware of the reverberation that occurs as a body hits the floor, followed by the cry of a voice distorted with pain.

“Tasha!”

It’s blinding, the fear and the rage and the urge to kill, not just to hurt but to _kill_ , a sensation she hasn’t felt in a long time. She advances again, her arms flying as she pulls tight punches and low cuts to knees and ankles and whatever else she can touch and there’s nothing except this, the anger and the desperation and the unraveling and _you wanna know what it feels like to be unmade, Barton? Do you? It feels like this, it feels like death and pain and hell and the worst thing that you can imagine, it feels like white noise and torture and electrocution; it feels like you’ll never ever be alive again unless it involves sinking your knife into someone’s throat; it feels like not knowing where your thoughts are and the person in front of you could be your lover for fuck’s sake and you still don’t care because you just want to kill and hurt and you don’t care you don’t care you don’t care._

“Tasha! NATASHA!” Clint’s voice is louder now, somewhere between anxiety and agony and everything sounds distant and far away. “It’s me. _It’s me_.”

_It’s me._

Something clicks in the back of her brain, a switch thrown into reverse as she tosses one more blow in his direction, knocking him sideways before they both collapse to the ground.

“Jesus Christ.” Clint’s lying on his back across the room, picking himself up slowly with visible pain. He gets to his feet and gazes at the white wall stained with red and the hole the size of a wrecking ball and Natasha on the floor, head pressed against her knees.

“What the _hell_?”

Natasha looks up, her eyes settling into a dull, clouded stare. For a half a second she debates not bothering with any of it, and then, suddenly, she can’t help herself.

“I’m pregnant.” Her voice breaks into a brittle laugh as she wipes a blood stained hand across her chin and it leaves behind a harsh pigment that, in the shadow of the room, makes her look like she’s just lost a war she’s battled a thousand times over.

“I’m fucking pregnant, Clint.”

 

***

 

Week One: Natasha likes to complete tasks.

It’s not that hard being a spy, not really, not if you’re good at it, and Natasha was damn good at it - the best that they’d known, eventually the best that S.H.I.E.L.D. had known, though she would be the first to say it took more than a year before Fury could admit it. Natasha liked tying up loose ends; she liked wiping her slate clean; she killed and lied and covered with ease and when her partners were too worried about taking the shot or when other assassins were too uncertain with their aim, Natasha never let her guard down, never came back with a job half done, never left a stone unturned.

It wasn’t really that complicated, to know that there wasn’t black or white or grey when it came to Natasha Romanov, that there was only black, that she got the job done or she left it in a body bag.

And so it’s her first instinct to take care of this task, to clean the slate, to get it out before it becomes too uncertain, before she gets too attached and too emotional. Wipe out the red, wipe out the possibilities, wipe out the contamination in her body and on her mind.

Clint once asked if her if she would ever act without reacting, if she would ever let it all go.

Natasha had laughed in his face.

 

***

 

In the Red Room, they don’t teach you about life. Clint knows that, she’s told him, he’s had his own experiences with people like her before she was her and he was him and they were them. Clint knows that they teach you how to fight, how to react, how to kill. They teach you no mercy. They teach you how to mold your face into an expression no one would ever suspect of having emotion, they teach you how to bite down on your fears until they disappear, until you’re not sure if they even exist. Until you’re not sure if you even exist.

They don’t teach you how to become unmade.

They don’t teach you how to remake yourself.

They don’t teach you anything except death.

_You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers…_

Loki’s fist slams against the glass cage with impossible force and Natasha jerks awake, one hand instinctively reaching towards the bedside table, her mind snapping into clarity almost instantly as she swings the covers forward, falling off the mattress in an ungraceful heap onto the floor. Clint makes a noise but remains otherwise still, bunched up and unmoving, a swatch of bedspread clutched in his left fist.

She runs her hands over her arms and neck, expertly trained fingers spotting for needle punctures or unidentified markings, rolls her tongue around in her mouth feeling for an out-of-ordinary taste and comes away with nothing. So it was possible she actually _did_ fall asleep of her own accord at some point, and she could only assume Clint had at least taken care of the rest and not left her to some pathetic ball of self-absorbed feelings on the floor of the living room.

Natasha picks herself up, silently padding out of the room and into the small kitchen. Flipping on the light, she moves to the counter drawers, giving the one next to the stove a sharp pull. The action exposes a simple collection of pristine cutlery and something in the back of her brain screams and it’s all she can to stop herself from crying out in unbridled rage.

_Son of a bitch, Barton, you asshole._

“You’re a piece of work,” Clint says quietly from behind and Natasha looks up, the lower half of her body quaking with rage.

“I want my knives back.”

She keeps her voice calm, the tone of her words brimming with a quietness that she knows he recognizes as dangerous, and he returns the threat just as hard with eyes unmoving.

“No.”

She can almost feel the change as the trigger inside her brain flips from Romanov to Romanova, her body spinning back towards the stove as she grabs the drawer and flings it to the ground. It breaks easily, a myriad of blunt forks and spoons clattering in all directions, the sharp impact of the silverware against the floor intermingling with her cries.

“Goddammit, Clint! I wasn’t going to do anything!”

He doesn’t answer and doesn’t move, just continues to stare, and the resulting silence only infuriates her more as she closes the space between them, reaching up to grip the bottom of his chin with one hand.

“Tell me where my knives are or I swear to _god_ , I will kill you.”

For just a moment she sees it – fear mingled with pain, a fleeting spark of emotion behind a look otherwise filled with hatred, fury and anger. It’s gone with the next blink but she doesn’t back down, even as she feels his body loosen, a tell she knows like the back of her hand and one that’s as familiar as her own name.

“No, Nat. You won’t.”

She can’t stop her hand from shaking as she drops it and when she looks up again, he’s standing in front of her with one palm massaging the underside of his neck. She curls her lips in disgust, pushing back against the counter.

“You trust that I won’t kill you but you take away my weapons because you don’t trust I won’t take a knife to my stomach? What kind of fuckery is that?”

Clint’s eyes don’t leave her face, and when he finally speaks, his voice is low and tired.

“The kind of fuckery that makes us a team, Natasha. Because god knows that’s _only_ reason we’ve survived this long.”

Survived. As if their lives are a measure of success, another victory to win, another prize to claim.

As if life is something that can be _quantified_.

She beelines to the couch, waiting to hear the inevitable creak of the floorboards and to feel the pull of the cushion underneath her. At some point, she gets tired of punching her pillow, of kneading the seams of her shirt, of wondering when the hell he’s going to tell her to stop, and when she closes her eyes she sees arrows, promises and vodka in the woods, hooded faces and screams, concentrated memories of the one day she should have died but didn’t.

 

***

 

Sometime later, she’s still trying to make herself tired enough to sleep, but Clint finally sits down next to her and then she’s wide awake even though her body feels exhausted in every sense of the word.

“What do you remember about Budapest?” She hears the way his voice catches in his throat and chooses to ignore it, concentrating instead on keeping her voice even.

“Why do you want to know about Budapest? Hasn’t there been enough emotional scarring tonight?”

“Last time I checked, I didn’t need an interrogation every time I asked a question.”

Natasha sighs, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. “Running. That stupid market with the woman selling ugly pillows. The fact that you chose possibly the dumbest aliases ever for us.” She pauses, and Clint raises an eyebrow.

“That’s it?”

Natasha takes a breath, tucking her legs beneath her chin. “I remember being scared. About the only time in my life I’d say I was scared on a mission. And then you…bleeding all over the goddamn hotel room like you owned the place.”

“According to those passports, we did,” Clint says with an air of nonchalance, as if she’s rattling off a laundry list of grocery items. Natasha shakes her head, her voice dropping.

“I remember patching you up. You wouldn’t shut up, just kept telling me that this was going to be fine, and I remember thinking about how when you died, I would have to go back and tell everyone how the great Hawkeye bled to death from a stab wound in a Motel 6 overseas.” Almost instinctively, her hand trails under his shirt, fingers tracing over the scar on his stomach, edges of the maimed skin sharp below her fingers. “And then you fucked me in that bed…and all I could think of was being worried that the shitty stitches I had made were going to come loose because you just couldn’t keep it in your pants.”

For a long time there’s silence, and then Clint shrugs once, loosely.

“Well, at least you remember something good.”

“Are you implying I wouldn’t remember if the sex was good?” Natasha rolls her head, her eyes suddenly serious. “There aren’t a lot of people in the world I’ve dropped my pants for, Barton.”

“No,” Clint answers with a hint of amusement. “I’m just making sure you remember the events correctly. A lot happened during that week.”

Natasha barks out a laugh at his words, unable to help herself.

“Right. Okay, wiseass. What do _you_ remember about Budapest? And don’t you dare say my underwear.”

It’s Clint’s turn to fumble silently, to speak softly, to turn his head towards the ceiling; a focus on darkness is easier sometimes and they both know it, they both abuse it, they’ve both been unmade by it.

“I remember realizing that was when I knew I really loved you. Even if you wouldn’t say it back.”

Natasha turns sharply and when he pushes his face towards her she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t recoil. She pushes back with the same intensity, her teeth finding the inside of his lip, tasting blood on her tongue as his hands crush her shoulders. He pulls away first, dragging himself upright, and she brings a hand to her face while shoving back strands of bright red, deflecting the only way she knows how.

“Clint Barton isn’t a father.”

“Clint Barton was sent to kill Natalia Romanova,” he shoots back, and she very nearly hisses in return.

“Show of hands for your empathy. Do you want a lollypop?”

“Natasha, I’m not going to tell you not have this kid,” Clint says, ignoring the retort. “But I’m also not going to be the one who takes that decision away from you.”

She rolls her tongue around in her mouth, swallowing down the scent she can still taste on her tongue and in her gums, and huffs out a breath.

“This life,” she says finally. “You get…you get born into it. And no, Clint, maybe this kid won’t be born with a ledger but we’re dripping with it, and one day that’s going to be something that’s inescapable. We’re assassins. We’re trained to bring death into the world…not life. Are you really just going to throw away your entire past in the hope of starting over? I mean, can you even think about walking around without a bow in your hand?”

He doesn’t immediately respond, an unsettled look shadowing the lower half of his face, and Natasha smiles sadly.

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “That’s what I thought.”

 

***

 

Week Two: Natasha hates being told what to do.

It was a known fact among everyone that know anyone that the Widow didn’t like to be managed, in the Red Room they knew from her resistance that the slightest order would cause her to lash out, would trigger her to kill, that being able to assassinate on command wasn’t so much of a side effect of brainwashing as it was an inherent part of her personality. She didn’t like to be told what to do, so she did it herself; she killed and saved and fought because she wanted to, because the switch in her mind told her to, and because she didn’t want someone to do it for her.

It’s why she grabbed Clint’s arrow, still docked between the strings of the bow, and pressed it to her skull because how dare he tell her what to do; _he_ was the one who had been sent to kill her and _he_ was the one who was supposed to end it, and now she was following him around like a fucking puppy stripped of any real control because S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t trust her on her own and he’s in charge and she’s following _his_ orders and _his_ directions and _his_ stupid rules that have just almost gotten both their covers blown.

“You wanna kill yourself, Natasha? Go ahead. Be my guest. See if I care.”

Natasha doesn't kill herself and Clint later tells her they’re even. She then makes it clear that if he ever tries to tell her what to do, there won’t be an equal score anymore.

 

***

 

“What would Natalia Romanova do?”

When Clint finally asks the question she doesn’t tell him he’s crazy, she doesn’t bother to wonder why his reactions aren’t more of a shitshow, because it’s Clint and she’s long been used to this kind of thing, understanding and silent comprehension in situations that would, for other people, unleash fear and anger and ten thousand different emotions, and its always been like that, Romanov and Barton, the hawk and the spider, balancing each other out between fucking and killing and everything in between.

_Agent Barton was sent to kill me. He made a different call._

It’s possible she would’ve known that answer once upon a long, long time ago, before mind games and kill targets and trigger warnings, before she counted herself lucky that she could put enough of her past behind her to function in the present without being unmade, or being a gun on the edge of explosion. She looks down, trails a finger over cut skin, still bruised from her bender of anger - she’ll heal soon enough, she knows that and he knows that and if there’s anything they’ve learned from Budapest and Japan and even those nights where his teeth bit her shoulder so hard he drew blood and those mornings where her fingers scraped against his chest so hard they left gashes, it’s that pain is nothing more than pain when it comes to this, when it comes to him, when it comes to them.

“What would Natasha Romanov do?”

Romanov. That’s who she is now. Natasha Romanov, the girl who was made and then unmade over and over until she didn’t have control of her body, her mind, her organs, her actions, her life, until she was the monster that everyone warned you about, the girl everyone ran from, the person that no one wanted to mess with unless they liked the taste of metal on their skin. _Little black widow, don’t tempt the spider, she’ll give you a bite worse than death and kill you slowly, carefully, where it hurts the most…_

“You know what she would do,” Natasha says slowly from her spot on the floor, feeling the tightness of Clint’s bicep as it stiffens against her skin. “You know what I _want_ to do.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

She looks up, her eyes turning to steel as a fire streaks across her pupils. “I don’t have to do that? Are you serious? We can’t have this baby, Clint; _I_ can’t have this baby! I’m a spy, not a mother!”

Clint’s palm brushes up and down against her leg. “You were never a soldier, either,” he responds quietly. “And I seem to recall you doing pretty well with that for someone who was _just a spy_.”

Natasha spreads her fingers over the floor, casting her gaze downward. “Not the same.”

“Tasha –“

“I don’t want it.” The words are out before she can stop them and she sees the look flash across his eyes before he can suppress it, turns away before he can say it out loud.

_That’s what you really were doing when you punched that wall, wasn’t it, Natasha? That’s what you were trying to destroy; you could care less about the house, you wanted it out, you wanted it gone, that’s what you wanted to destroy because you think that this isn’t you and this can never be you, so why the hell are you thinking it can be? You’re a spy, not a soldier._

_You’re a killer, not a mother._

“I don’t want it,” she repeats, louder, and for just a second the hand on her leg stills.

“Okay.”

Natasha snaps her head up, barely able to hide the surprise that slides over her face. “ _Okay_?”

“Yeah.” Clint kneads his fingers together, as though he’s trying to steady himself as well as his words. “Okay.”

She pushes back on her elbows, flattening her body against the floor. “So that’s it, then. You’re just going to let me do what I want with this…thing.”

Clint shrugs, looking slightly uncomfortable, and she sees the shift in his gaze as their eyes lock together.

“I don’t think you know what you want.”

Natasha feels her body go rigid at his words and sucks in a shallow breath, willing herself not to react in the way that her body is instinctively telling her to. “Go to hell,” she spits angrily, training her gaze to the ceiling as he lets out a breath.

“Natasha.” Clint sighs, running a hand over the lower half of his face. “You’ve been compromised.”

Her eyes don’t move. “So have you.”

“It’s different,” he returns quietly. “You’ve always been compromised, Nat. I’ve never…until a few weeks ago…” He trails off, and she can almost see him working out the words in his head. “You’ve never been allowed to have what you want.”

“And so you’re going to assume this is what I want?” Natasha brings her eyes back to meet his, her voice dripping with contempt. “A child born out of two killers who grew up as orphans? Because that always works out.”

“No.” Clint shakes his head. “I’ll never assume anything about you. Ever. I just want you to promise me you’ll sleep on it, that…that you won’t do anything rash. Okay? Can you promise that?”

_No. I can’t promise that because I don’t want this and I don’t want to be a mother and I’m not going to have any part of this trick that life is choosing to play and no, I can’t promise, Clint, I’m sorry but I can’t fucking promise._

She closes her eyes against the screaming voice in her head and moves her chin up and down while the fingers in her hand tighten their grip.

“Yeah.”

 

***

 

Week Three: Natasha is used to control.

It wasn’t so much a spy thing or an assassin thing or even a Widow thing as much as it was a Natasha thing and if she could remember back far enough to a time before there was red and before there was identity changing, she would be the first to tell you that she had always gravitated towards control, that she liked having the upper hand and that she liked being in charge and that she liked making people listen. When she was a child, they listened because they were interested and when she was an adult, they listened because they were scared, but it was control all the same, whether she was a girl reciting a poem or a woman holding a gun and anything she couldn’t control either became managed or became dead. There wasn’t much wiggle room for something in between.

Natasha is used to having control, but not used to losing it. She screamed for hours in the woods the night that Clint refused to kill her, and she screams for hours now, until her voice is raw and her muscles are aching. 

Clint calls it release.

Natasha calls it hell.

 

***

 

The thing about being a spy, and Natasha learned this quick enough, is that it’s a sort of initiation into a life that’s not chosen and never forgotten but always accepted. You learn how to run, how to fight and destroy and track, how to read minds and quell emotions. You learn how to forget your name and lose your own trust, but trust the hell out of others that don’t deserve it.

The thing about being an assassin, and Natasha learned this quick enough, is that no one tells you how you’re going to feel when you make your first kill. No one tells you about the guilt and the rage and the nights that you’ll spend doubting your morals and internally screaming into a pillow in lieu of throwing yourself out of a 10th story window. You live for the purpose of being a killer and a murderer, someone who makes messes and then cleans them up. People are afraid of you, they fear you more than death, you live with the pain and the suffering and sleepless nights that come to mean nothing and everything.

The thing about being a mother, and Natasha doesn’t learn this at all because she never has to, is that you can’t be a spy and you can’t be an assassin. You have to live a life of moral good and quiet calm; you can’t walk around with guns strapped to your waist and daggers in your boots; you can’t turn to instinct every time something unnerves you or catches you off guard. Being a mother isn’t missions and passports and hotel rooms and secret identities, it’s soccer games and play dates and birthday cakes and photo albums and nothing Natasha Romanov ever had.

But the thing about all of this is that no matter what Natasha has or hasn’t experienced, she’s become an expert at _going through the motions_ and so she does just that. There’s a point where she realizes that she hasn’t seen Clint in days, except for when they’re lying entangled in the sheets and in each other, but they’ve long been used to coming and going at their own paces so she doesn’t think twice about it and instead reads case files, occasionally goes on consulting missions, sends status updates when she feels she’s not on the edge of rage.

A few days into September, as she’s reading over a progress report about a weapons facility in Australia, he sits down in the chair across from her, silent until she finally looks up and acknowledges his presence.

“What’s this?” Her eyes register the small box that he shoves across the table and she takes the top off to reveal the sharp and pointed ends of her daggers. Clint’s eyes follow the movement of her hands as they slide the cover back into place.

“You asked me if I could think about walking around without a bow in my hand,” he says finally, and she looks up with raised eyebrows as he shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s who I am, Tasha. It’s part of me, the same way your weapons are a part of you.”

“Is this some kind of belated revelation that you needed a yoga retreat to figure out?” She asks, struggling and failing to keep the sarcasm out of her tone. Clint sighs.

“It’s acceptance. I thought about what you asked me – could I live a normal life, give this child the clean ledger they deserve to have? Could I not worry about shooting the first guy who so much as touches my kid without permission?”

“Would make dating a piece of cake,” Natasha interjects sullenly, one hand fingering the bottom of the box. He ignores her comment, continuing the conversation over her words.

“I can’t, Nat. And neither can you.” He leans over and picks up his bow, sliding it across the table. “We both know that.”

Natasha reaches forward almost hesitantly, two fingers pressing against the curved frame, stilling her mind against images of blood and water, hands and mouths, the first time she demanded that she be allowed to see “the weapon that should have caused her death.”

“I still don’t know what I want,” she says finally, and Clint stretches his fingers towards her face, their eyes a mirror of worry and understanding and for the first time, each other.

“Yeah. I know.”


End file.
